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In-Reply-To:  Your message of "Thu, 05 Nov 1998 14:03:13 EST." 
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Date:         Thu, 5 Nov 1998 17:37:31 +0000
From: Robin Fairbairns <Robin.Fairbairns@CL.CAM.AC.UK>
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To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L
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Subject:      Re: Quotes and punctuation
Status: R

Peter Schmitt wrote:
> On Wed, 4 Nov 1998 17:09:45 GMT Sebastian Rahtz said:
> >it was a joke. i was simplying that rendering of abstract things like
> >`quoted text' need not involve quote marks; and that SGML/XML markup
> >of abstract markup is much easier to parse than TeX....
>
> The relevant comparison in this case is with _LaTeX markup_
>   ( TeX could parse SGML/XML as easily as any other program :-)

careful, now.  sgml (with all bells and whistles) has been tried, and
no product has ensued: while it's possible in principle (cf all those
silly arguments about turing completeness and what it means) it seems
rather difficult in practice.

xml is, of course, a different matter, having been designed to address
these parsing issues.

> But, of course, LaTeX is more friendly to the user than HTML
>    -- that's the penalty one has to pay ...

i boggle (is it _really_ peter saying this? ;-)

i had an argument earlier today with a research student here, where i
was suggesting that the perceived difficulty of html was due to his
lack of familiarity with it.

as sebastian said (while i was in my seminar), the proof of this
pudding is the number of authors in the respective languages.  i
continue to believe that there remains a future for a latex-like
language, but it's impossible to claim that it's going to be the
majority's choice.

robin